Simon Ward reviews A Beginner’s Guide To Widowhood at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre

Created by Omar Khan, based on his mother Nancy’s story, and written by Rae Mainwaring, this one woman show is the work of many hands. All the more remarkable, then, that Liz Jadav’s performance is so utterly convincing. Under the direction of Andrew Breakwell, and with movement directed by Kitty Winter, she throws herself about the stage with energy and precision, demonstrating the endless creative possibilities of a small wooden stool-cum-stepladder.

Jadav plays Suria Smith, widowed far too young after the sudden death of her husband Dan. She is of an age where the word ‘widow’ sounds absurdly inappropriate. In the face of this absurdity she decides to escape the post-funeral chaos by going to Turkey on holiday with her two not-quite-grown-up children Selma and Adi. Armed only with a well-thumbed guidebook, a memento of a previous trip with her husband, she is not quite sure what she is looking for, but she just knows that she has to get away. The children, also shell-shocked, go along to humour her, and probably also to make sure she is all right. They have all been wounded and perhaps instinctively huddle together for mutual protection. Which does not mean that they refrain from explaining to their mother what an idiot she is at any opportunity.

Mainwaring brilliantly captures the accoutrements of loss, like the relentless stream of lasagnes appearing on the doorstep, then, just as abruptly stopping, when people have decided that it is time to ‘move on’. Friends begin to cross the street, hoping they haven’t been spotted, as if bereavement were an infectious disease. Worse, the ones who comfortingly advise that she is lucky to be young enough to find someone else. She is also astute on the gallows humour that binds the family together in the face of this onslaught – competing to outdo each other on the endless euphemisms to avoid confronting the terminal reality of death.

This is a funny, moving, ultimately uplifting piece of theatre – I was in tears throughout, though there are lots of laughs as well. There is a particular poignancy to a loss early in life, when there were so many plans and projects still to be realised, but loss at any time is perhaps the biggest challenge we have to negotiate, and hence why the play is so powerful and affecting. Grief is, in the end, the price we have to pay for love. But there is no right way to grieve – if you want to go on an hilariously inappropriate holiday with two surly children, then so be it. If it means making your daughter throw up on Baileys or going hang- gliding with your son, well maybe that is all part of the process too. After all, if life isn’t about plunging headlong into the unknown, then what is it about?

A Beginner’s Guide To Widowhood is running at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre, 42-44 Gaisford Street, London NW5 2ED until Saturday 5th September